She Fits Pieces Of Past Into A Future

Carol Mundy Pursues Her Mission Through Layers Of Dust And Time.

The tall woman with a short Afro steals a peek at her watch. She's late. It's 10:15. On her day off. No one is watching the clock.

Antiques stores open at 10. She's anxious to collect the rhythm and blues 45s she placed on layaway a payday past. And she's planning to pan for more gold.

Some days, she imagines that if she brings home another mammy doll, Ku Klux Klan belt buckle or "Colored Only" sign, the walls will rupture and spill out thousands of artifacts of an African-American past. But the anonymous sepia faces arrayed on a wall in her parlor cry out for acknowledgment. So do the voices of reverends King, Abernathy and Shuttlesworth -- frozen in time in her foyer -- demanding that America hold to its promises of equality.

The last nine years of her life she has labored to assemble the scattered African-American mosaic, one piece at a time.

She'll find room somewhere.

And so Carol Mundy gathers her car keys. She's off to Central Florida's antiques districts, where she searches alone for a lost past. She's an amateur archivist. The 53-year-old Orlando woman has gathered a world-class collection of African-Americana. It's a museum-quality trove that she would like to move out of her home and into a local institution. Interest in doing so is high, but funding prospects are low. She may be forced to look north if state historic preservation funds keep shrinking.

With the giddiness of a debutante primping for a first date, she gathers her gear: powder blue Nikes, jeans, tie-dyed T-shirt. Comfort, she believes, is necessary when digging for treasure.

She grabs a pen and a slip of paper from the writing table in the parlor, stops to arm the alarm and steps out the door. She pulls her Calvin Klein sunglasses from the glove compartment and inventories her supply of Handi-Wipes. Unearthing history, she has learned, stirs up dirt.

1901 BOOK HOLDS SURPRISE

Around 11:15 she steps out of her Mercury Tracer and steps into Orange Tree Antiques Mall in Orlando. She greets the storeowner, Sherrie Hershone, and threads her way through rows of other people's junk. She pauses by a curio to scrutinize a ceramic black Moor statue. Mundy leans forward and stares at the sable-colored man dressed in a genie getup, his arms raised as though he were Atlas supporting the world. Then she stares at the price: $125. Her eyebrows rise into chevrons. She wants to begin collecting black Moors -- and this piece, she knows, will stay on her mind until she figures out a way to raise the money to buy it.

Rarely does she spend more than $25 for anything. She works on a strict budget. No more than $100 today. But she routinely finds treasures for less. Once, at a flea market, she was attracted to a cardboard box the size of a tin of Altoids that bore a drawing of boxer Joe Louis.

After a time, she happens upon a classic: Little Black Sambo. A 1950 printing. $45. Firm. She already owns several editions. Still, she stares into Sambo's sooty face as though she recognizes an old friend.

Mundy remembers. Her father tried to explain to the colorblind 10-year-old how race colored their times, that she was "colored," which was why a "WHITES ONLY" sign posted at the Cincinnati, Ohio, pool meant she could never join the white kids cannonballing into the deep end.

Her parents, James H. Mundy, a dentist, and Carolyn, a private-duty nurse, however, had shown her that she could rise above perceptions.

She watched a parade of famous black men stream through their home. She talked with King and remembers how at 5'11" she towered over him and how she couldn't help but join him whenever he laughed -- it was a laugh volumes bigger than he was, a laugh that erupted from some place deep in his spirit.

And she remembers the anger and disbelief that crackled through her soul as she listened to Rev. Shuttlesworth's stories about how he was beaten, how he was knocked unconscious with high-pressure fire hoses, and how his home was dynamited while he slept.

Eventually, a nation, more or less, merged, but the Shuttlesworths split in 1975. Mundy moved to Orlando in 1987, and took a job in flight operations with Comair, a regional airline and subsidiary of Delta Air Lines.

Mundy always knew she would become an antiques collector, just like her mother. She started collecting Steuben glass and books. In 1993, she bought a 1901 edition of Complete Life of William McKinley and Story of His Assassination.